Free WordPress Hosting with Heroku

Posted on Saturday August 4, 2012

Note: Before you get started hosting your next WordPress site for free, you will need to know how to use Git and Heroku.

Hosting Wordpress on Heroku is not only free but easy thanks to this repository on GitHub. By completing the following steps you will end up with a free WordPress site hosted on Heroku using Postgres for the backend instead of MySQL. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments or send me a message on Twitter.

After deployment, navigate to your url that you setup and walk through the normal WordPress installation steps.

Updating

Inevitably you are going to want to update your installation of WordPress as time goes on. The maintainer of this repository is pretty timely in updating it for future releases of WordPress. You will want to watch this repository for updates on GitHub and then follow these steps to update your installation.

Once Heroku recognizes your custom domain(s) you’ll then need to setup separate DNS A records for the following ip addresses to point to your domain:

75.101.163.44
75.101.145.87
174.129.212.2

Once the DNS A records propagate, then simply test out your change by hitting the url in the browser to make sure you are good to go. If you are in need of cheap DNS hosting then I would recommend DNSimple.

The last step is updating your WordPress installation to recognize the new domain. You’ll need to open up the WordPress Admin Dashboard and go to Settings –> General. From there just update the URL for the WordPress address and you’re done.

If you find yourself running into problems, there is a guide posted in the Heroku Docs which can be found here.

Summary

I hope this post on helping you get free WordPress hosting on Heroku up and running was helpful. If you found this useful, please feel free to share this article with your friends and followers. Thanks!